Fdisk.exe is a process associated with the Fdisk utility, which is a disk partitioning utility of Microsoft. Fdisk is used for creating and deleting partitions on your hard disk. The term fdisk stands for Fixed Disk.

This utility is available only in Windows 95, 98 and ME versions. It is no longer available on the newer Windows versions. Fdisk.exe is a legitimate component and is not a spyware, Trojan or other kind of malware.

Importance of Fdisk

Fdisk helps in effective management of available space on the hard disk by facilitating the creation of partitions as well as manipulation of this space. The three functions performed by Fdisk are:

Fdisk formats the hard drive

It logically partitions the hard disk

It names the partitions for different uses.

Some of the users might want a single partition whereas other users may want to divide up space as per your requirements. The fdisk command allows you to specify the partition size.

Issues and Limitations related to Fdisk.exe

Like all computer files, fdisk.exe may have certain issues. One of the most common issues that is encountered is partition of hard disks bigger than 64 GB. When you try partitioning a hard drive larger than 64 GB in a computer that is running Windows 95, 98 or Me, the Fdisk utility does not report the right hard disk size. The disk size that is reported is the total size of the disk minus 64 GB.

The reason for this is that Fdisk.exe uses 16-bit values to calculate drive size and when size becomes more than 64 GB it leads to overflow of variables. Microsoft has acknowledged this is as a problem and offers fix for it. If your PC has encountered this error, you can download fdisk.exe hotfix from Microsoft website.

Another major limitation is the inability of the Fdisk command to partition a hard drive that is more than 12 GB in size. You may not receive any error message if you attempt a partition, but the partitioning will be the incorrect size. This is a limitation by design and therefore, there is no fix available for this. In order to work around this issue, you can use other third party programs for managing partitions.

Other irritants that users encounter with the Fdisk.exe process is that it is not possible to shift computer applications between partitions without uninstalling and then reinstalling the application. To properly uninstall the applications so that any remnant files may not obstruct reinstallation, it is advised that you use a reliable and compatible third-party program uninstaller tool such as Perfect Uninstaller.

Another issue is that Fdisk removes all the data that is present in your hard disk. So, it is recommended that before you use the fdisk command, you first make a backup of all the data stored on your hard disk.